Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Apologies for the lack of updates. Gardening, cycling and general spring distractions have cut into my painting time. I did managed to finish off 48 Roman Auxilia from Strelets for a CCA army.

A fair chunk of them are spear armed, which are useful. Overall, nice figures although I much prefer the ones with cast-on weapons.

There are also some armed with swords. These are generally pretty good poses, excepting the ones in the backrow of the first photo below.

What I was most struck by while painting these guys is that there could work for early Romano-Brits. Helmets maybe aren't perfect, but the guys in the cloaks would do just fine. I don't think there is a plastic 1/72-scale set for this period so nice to know there is an option.

Up next: Gaming with Bruce tonight, then MayDay on the weekend. I am also working on a terrain commission for Flames of War.

Friday, April 19, 2013

The build up of imperial Roman armies in 1/72-scale continues. This is a box of Strelets Roman cavalry in battle. It is a nice enough set with 12 rider poses and six different horses. I see that I forgot to detail the banner held by the leader!

The riders fit beautifully on these horses, which is almost the never the case with 1/72 plastics. On the downside, some of the long straight pieces have some unfortunately bends and a few of the horses have donkey ears. Overall, a pretty nice set. These fellows will be heavy cavalry in CCA. I have some Gauls on the way to fill in the medium and light cavalry units.

Up next: Some terrain building will happen this weekend. And I'm working on a box of auxilia to round out the basics of the army. Pretty nice that you can get a full Roman army from four boxes of Strelets.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

We had 12 guys out to the club this week, including newcomer Wesley and there were five games running! I played in Bruce's Warbirds game (basically WW2 Canvas Eagles) with Andy and Terry. I think we got four (or maybe five?) games in in about two and a half hours.

The first couple of games saw a crippled B-17 getting jumped. The first game the B-17 had an escort and the second game it did not. Warbirds is surprisingly easy to pick up but has some subtleties that take a game or two or cotton onto ("I'm going waaaaaay to fasssst..."). I think the bomber had split outcomes, with game one including a pilot killed, a mid-air collision (sorry Terry, my bad) and a plane exploded. We got better though.

We then did some dogfights. Man, the P-51 is a helluva plane. The first game was a decisive allied win with Andy landing with a dead engine and Terry piling into the ground in a spin. Game two didn't go so well for the allies with leaking fuel lines and fire... .

There was some Warmachine, some Vietnam and some insurgency being played. And Dennis and Dave played some more LaSalle. I caption this photo "God wills it, Dennis!" as Dave basks in the Sun and Dennis fishes around for less cursed dice.

Up next: Some 1/72 Romans horse are drying and some auxiliaria are underway. I also have some terrain to do this weekend.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Today the last batch of the Strelet's Imperial Roman Velites is dry enough to photograph. These guys will be used as light troops in Commands and Colors Ancients Imperial Roman expansion.

There are 16 guys in four poses. Most are throwing (or have just thrown) javelins. Not sure why all of these imperial Romans are wearing pelts (Punic Wars re-enactors?) but what can you do? A couple of really flat poses but all told this box is a real boon for gamers--lots of light troops in multiples of four and no completely useless poses.

Up next: I have some Roman cavalry underway and am cutting and assembling a bunch of Roman auxilia off the sprue. Since more snow is forecast this weekend, I hope to make some progress. There is also club night coming up on Tuesday.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Continuing on with Monday's post on 1/72 Roman light troops, I have finished 16 slingers from the Strelets Roman Velites box. It was quite a job to cut these guys from the sprues and I can see that I was impatient and didn't get all of the mold lines on the shields scrapped off.

There are four poses among the slingers, including one where the slinger has just cast his stone and one end of the sling is loose. I have never seen that pose before and it is a neat one.

Up next: I have 16 1/72 light Romans coming off the production line tomorrow. THen likely a few days to paint up some Roman cavalry.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Bruce trotted out the new Russian expansion to Commands and Colors Napoleonics last night and we played the first battle in the scenario book (French attack in 1806). A couple of interesting Russian rules (rolling to see which units are at paper strength; ignoring retreat rolls) to keep in mind.

In the first game, Bruce launched offensives on each flank. On the Russian (foreground) right, I got some really lucky dice and shot him to pieces. On the Russian left, Bruce captured the town but it was something of a meat-grinder for him. Eventually, more lucky shooting in the middle did him in.

Game two was largely a repeat, although it was much closer for the French. Again, lucky shooting helped the Russians out. I also managed to get my cavalry out and behind his lines to clean up some units. I quite like the Cossack units (weak but the loss doesn't count against). Bruce made more of an effort to snag objectives (or was more successful) in this game. An interesting scenario wrinkle is that every set of entrenchments no occupied by the Russians gives a temporary victory point to the French.

Overall, a good game. The weird thing about CCN is that when you start to deconstruct it, it makes no sense. But as a whole is makes for a great game with convincing results.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

With GMT about to re-release Expansion 2 of the Commands and Colors Ancient series this summer, I have been slowly painting up some Imperial Roman troops. Today, I finished the bowmen from the Strelets Roman Velites box.

Functional enough figures that took paint reasonably well. Cutting them off the sprues was rather laborious but the chunky sculpt is more my thing than the usual ultra-thin 1/72-scale sculpts. Helpfully, there are four sets of four which works out about perfectly for my needs.

Up next: I have some 1/72 slingers from the same box that are almost dry. And tonight I'm off to Bruce's for some gaming--not sure what yet. Then more 1/72 stuff (light troops are finished painting and I have just built some Roman cavalry).

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

We had 12 guys out at the club last night and four games ran--a pretty good evening given the nice spring weather. The most notable portion of the evening was the Warmachine game, where Kevin played with both unpainted and proxied figures ("unclean!"). What is going on, man?

Bruce, Terry, Scott and I played Dominion. There are no dice in this game and you can see Scott below rejoining and saying something like "And now I'm going to show you how this done, boys." And he did.

Stu hosted a sci-fi game with Chen, Neil and Dan. This was still going on when I left.

And Dave and Dennis played a game of LaSalle. This was very pretty with 1/72 figures from both of their collections.

Here you can see Dennis asking "Does anyone know how to google up cannon versus square on this damned phone?"

Monday, April 1, 2013

I have just finished the last of a commission I took on to paint a 15mm group of US units for the Battle of the Bulge.

There is a platoon of 57mm anti-tank guns. I'm not sure how well these will fare against the jadgtigers in the fellow's German army... . I see that I forgot to include the platoon commander in this shot (he is below).

There are all 10 bases of bazooka teams. And then (left to right) the ATG commander, the company commander and the 2ic for the company. I need to do a touch more work on the bases (sealing the snow and putting on some command markings) but these should be finished up tonight.

Up next: The club runs on Tuesday and I hope to play some Warbirds. And I have some 1/72 Roman light troops that have been giving me the stink eye as I painted these WW2 fellows.

My buddy Bruce is thinning his collection slightly and has asked me to sell some of his WW2 Battle of Britain planes. There are 93 painted planes (plus a few unpainted) and these are 1/432-scale models, based upon the pocket recognition models of the day. I don't recall why the odd-ball scale except that it had to do with the size of the actual plane at 1000 yards or something like that.

These planes are all metal and each has a ball-head pin glued to the underside. When combined with an alligator clip on a flight stand, this allows you to model the plane turning, diving and climbing (and crashing, as I often found out). The pins could also be snipped off flush with the plane without any damage if you fancy a different basing system.

First up are the British (left to right), with 11x Hurricanes (Mk1), 10x Halifax bombers and 6 x Spitfire Mk V. All are hand painted and decaled. I believe Bruce got these from John Stanoch when he first launched his "Squadrons" series of games (which I see was revived in 2010).

This set allows you to have "instance Battle of Britain". Bruce would like $100 for the lot and the postage in Canada or the US will be $15. I'll individually wrap each plane in bubblewrap for the shipping. Offers to bob.barnetson@shaw.ca.